[People are still arriving here because they have received an email attributed to myself comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler. They are also still calling my home, contacting the public affairs office of the Naval War College, and deluging another David Kaiser with emails. I did not write, and do not agree with, that fraudulent email. You may however be interested to read the following post. Meanwhile, here is the best explanation I've found of why that email is so incredibly popular.]
The Obama Administration's difficulties on the domestic front, I think, reflect a long-term shift in American opinion. In 1968, after 35 years of largely Democratic ascendancy which had created a relatively egalitarian economy and established a strong role for the government, the Republican Party, increasingly led after 1976 by its conservative wing, began its successful campaign to establish a national majority. Their strategy had two major aspects. The first--which was largely handed to them, as Lyndon Johnson himself realized, by the great civil rights act--involved picking up the southern white vote, which became nearly as reliably Republican as it had previously been reliably Democratic. The second involved a long campaign to change Americans' minds about the proper role of government. The Republican Party has temporarily at least lost its majority--but the enormous influence of that campaign remains.
We can see that influence reflected in three major, related issues: the economy, the federal budget, and health care. Taking the first two first, our economy has been (and is still being) enormously distorted by the enormous profits available to the financial industry. Because taxes on capital gains have become so low (and because some of the biggest players in the financial game, hedge fund managers, can evidently claim nearly all their income in that form), traders and private equity firms can make, and keep,enormous profits. Meanwhile, the federal budget defect--already swelled to gigantic size by eight years of George W. Bush--has doubled again because of the recession. (I strongly suspect, and hope to show, that one reason that federal revenues have become so recession-sensitive is that they are so largely composed of payroll taxes.)
Now the solution to both of these problems, is, actually, rather obvious: a return to high marginal tax rates--something between 50%, which is common in Europe,and 90%, which the US levied from the time of the Second World War until 1965--on high incomes--say, incomes of over $2 million a year--from whatever source derived. If quick profits will go the federal government, managers will no longer seek them. There will be far more incentive, as there was half a century ago, to re-invest profits in expanded firms, actually producing more, rather than fewer jobs. And we will have a prospect of a long-term reduction in the deficit.
Yes, by historical standards, this is obvious--but thirty years of Republican propaganda and lobbyists' contributions have made this solution not just impossible, but unmentionable. This morning's Washington Post informed me, to my amazement, that the Obama Administration does not even intend to allow various Bush tax cuts to lapse! We have found that enormous, largely untaxed incomes do not stimulate the economy: higher wages for average Americans do. But we can't even talk about this solution--it's comparable to suggestions that we stage a Leninist revolution, undo women's liberation, or bring back slavery.
Something even more striking is happening with regard to health care. Everyone seems to understand that we spend too much on it and can't afford to go on at this rate. But Republicans and lobbyists seem very close to having killed the public option because it would be a cheaper form of health care.. What we need, we cannot have. The broader problem is obvious. Cheaper health car4e means that many people will make less money out of health care--especially insurance companies and drug manufacturers. I have not heard even one participant in this debate suggest that there is something immoral about profiteering on medical care. Instead, the papers are filled with stories of the ways in which lobbyists are trying to make sure that a new bill will mean no less, and perhaps more, money for health care interests.
I am concerned by all this because I think that both the political future and that of the Obama Administration depend on facing these issues squarely. A health insurance "reform" that costs even more money will eventually have huge political costs for Democrats. Endless deficits with no end in sight will pose the same problem, and the collapse of yet another Wall Street bubble could easily return the Republicans to power. We cannot solve these problems without removing some of these taboos. The press, which consistently gives the most space to the shrillest voices on the right, has been no help either. The Administration has shown the courage to defy the conventional wisdom on several foreign policy issues, including missile defense and Iran, without apparently incurring political costs. Let us hope that it finds the courage to do the same on the far more critical domestic front.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Why Obama won the prize
Like everyone else, I was quite astonished yesterday morning when I went on-line and discovered that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Fortunately, the topic I had planned on writing about today has become even more relevant because of that decision. Upon reflection, I think I understand the committee's choice, and indeed, am inclined to believe that it reflects a sound appreciation on its part of the turning point at which the world finds itself. This is especially hard for Americans to grasp, I would suggest, because the spectrum of opinion in America is so radically different from opinion in every other advanced industrial country, as well as in much of the third world. Indeed, when Rush Limbaugh commented yesterday that "conservatives" like himself found themselves in agreement with the Taliban that Obama did not deserve the prize, he was saying something surprisingly profound. As usual, I shall try to make my point with the help of an analogy, this one from 100 years ago.
The first President to win the Nobel prize was, of course, Theodore Roosevelt, who received it in 1906 in recognition of having mediated peace between the Russians and the Japanese, after two years of very costly war. The second was Woodrow Wilson, whom I have had a chance to study more closely in recent years, and whose career reveals a lot about how the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world has changed over the last 100 years. Wilson when he assumed office held a view, very popular among Americans not only then but for the next 25 years or so, that the world's problems stemmed from the failure of nations to act according to established laws and rules. He and his Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, were at the forefront of a movement to conclude arbitration treaties with various powers to provide an alternative means of settling disputes. That movement, however, had not caught on among the major European powers, who were still relying on a mix of diplomacy, alliances, and larger military establishments to secure their interests. In 1914 diplomacy failed and the First World War broke out.
Two nations, for different reasons, unleashed that war. First, Austria-Hungary--faced with a long-term threat to its existence from Serbia and other new states, which included the state-sponsored Serbian terrorism that killed the heir to the throne at Sarajevo--adopted the exact same policy that the Bush Administration embraced in 2001 after 9/11. Because the Serbian state sheltered terrorists, it had to be removed by force. The Bush Administration implemented this policy both in Afghanistan, where it at least had some plausibility, and in Iraq, where it did not. In the latter case, the Bush Administration, like Vienna in 1914, submitted an ultimatum which was clearly designed to be rejected to provide a pretext for war, and disregarded the attempts of the recipient of the ultimatum to comply. Germany, meanwhile, seized upon the Austro-Hungarian-Serbian crisis as a good chance for a trial of strength with France, Russia, and if necessary Britain, and encouraged the Austrians to proceed, blocking diplomatic attempts to find a solution and unleashing a world war. Wilson was appalled, and spent two and one-half heroic years trying to find a peaceful solution to the war. In his last attempt, his great "peace without victory" speech in January 1917, he carefully avoided any judgment of the rights and wrongs of the conflict, calling for a peace based upon impartial principles. Neither side was interested. The British bitterly reproached him for what we now call "moral equivalence," and the Germans decided on unrestricted submarine warfare in an attempt to force Britain's surrender, even though they knew that it would force Wilson into the war.
It is hard to say how much freedom of action Wilson had in 1917, but I have become convinced that his decision to enter the war was a mistake. Tragically, Wilson's estimate of the situation was right: Europe desperately needed a compromise peace, in which neither side was as yet seriously interested. Such a peace might conceivably have come about had we stayed out of the war; there was no chance that it would do so after our entry, because the Allies would trust in their increasingly superior resources. After the Armistice--one which left Germany at the Allies' mercy--Wilson tried but inevitably failed to write his principles of impartiality into the Versailles Treaty. But traditional authority had already collapsed all over central and eastern Europe--most notably in Germany and in Russia--eventually allowing totalitarian movements to take over, and unleashing an even bigger war. Still, Wilson in 1919 became the second sitting President to receive the prize.
During the last 64 years, the United States and its allies have managed, remarkably, to make Wilson's dreams reality among the industrialized nations of the world. Under a succession of Democratic and Republican Administrations from Truman through Clinton, the richer nations came together, confronted Communism, and eventually saw it fall. After three generations of peace among them, their military establishments--event our own--have fallen to historically very low levels. No wars have taken place within advanced nations in all that time. While the Third World has been the scene of terrible conflicts, virtually the entire population of the advanced nations today has lived their life untouched by war.
The Nobel Committee, it seems to me, awarded its prize to President Obama because of its concern over the trends of the last nine years. Two new elements transformed the world situation in 2001, with disastrous consequences. They were, respectively, Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda on the one hand, and the conservative Republican Administration of George W. Bush on the other. What is confusing Americans today is that while the world recognizes both of them and the ideas and strategies they represented as very serious dangers, the United States does not.
Last month, at the ninth anniversary of 9/11, I saw several commentaries arguing that Bin Laden had been a failure. They were wrong. Bin Laden, along with George W. Bush, is to date the most influential figure of the new century. I have become increasingly convinced that we have never really understood what Bin Laden was trying to do, or what his real goals are. He is not really very interested, I now believe, in what happens in the United States or even in Europe. For decades he has been fighting a civil war within the Muslim world, most notably in his native Saudi Arabia, where he hates the government partly because of its association with our own. 9/11 was an attempt, I think, to provoke the United States into direct intervention in the region, because that would provide a focal point for extremist resentment and further tend to discredit our allies there. The Bush Administration's decision to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq played into his hands, all the more so because the United States lacked sufficient forces to do either job effectively. But those decisions also represented a decisive change in American foreign policy, one that threatened the whole postwar consensus in which the world had thrived.
As I have said here many times, the decision to invade Iraq, in particular, was a repudiation of all the principles of international law for which the United States had stood, at least in theory, since Wilson. The Bush Administration's National Security strategy embraced international anarchy, by claiming the right to overthrow any regime that might develop weapons which we did not think they should have. We should not have been surprised that it received almost no international support, with Britain alone among advanced industrial countries supporting it. Since 1945 the United States had been the leading supporter of international organizations; now, under Bush, they became impediments that stood in the way of what we judged we had to do. (Last night Rachel Maddow, in an excellent feature on the prize, ran a clip of John Bolton explaining that the United States government had no interest in the United Nations except to the extent that it could promote American objectives.) Bush also extended the anarchic philosophy to our ally Israel, by declaring that Israel would keep any territory that it had settled and wanted to keep in a final peace agreement. He declared, and implemented, a policy of indefinitely detaining and torturing captives and denying them any legal recourse, in violation of numerous laws and treaties which the United States had either passed or signed and ratified. And, of course, prodded by Dick Cheney, he spent about six years threatening Iran with war if it did not desist from its nuclear program.
It is, of course, perhaps the greatest difference between the United States on the one hand and Europe and Northeast Asia on the other, that they have experienced first hand the consequences of a philosophy of international anarchy, as practiced beginning in the 1930s by Japan and Germany, while we have not. The Second World War left them destroyed and destitute while raising us to new pinnacles of prosperity and power. And thus, their commitment to an orderly world has been much stronger, and remains so--partly because the aftermath of the war lasted so much longer in those countries than here, as well. The Nobel Committee, in my opinion, was reacting to signs that the United States was indeed getting back on track before it was too late.
They were not a moment too soon. The last year has shown just how difficult it will be to reverse the damage the Bush Administration did. Although we are slowly exiting in Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan has gotten much worse, and threatens to spill over into Pakistan. Iran has made considerable nuclear progress. President Obama tried, and in effect, to withdraw the critical concession Bush made to the Israeli government in order to promote peace. And the President is disinclined to treat the torture and detention policies of the Bush Administration as crimes. Yet the President has shown by both word and deed that he believes in a different world and a different foreign policy. His speeches, like Wilson's have inspired the world. And although the media have underplayed it, the Iranian agreement to allow Russia to enrich its uranium is an absolutely critical concession for the whole non-proliferation effort. It is, indeed, exactly the solution proposed by Graham Allison in his book, Nuclear Terrorism. The prize will undoubtedly give a boost to the President's broader goal of working towards the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. The decision not to station useless anti-ballistic missiles in the heart of Europe reversed another disastrous step, one which had begun to undermine the peaceful structure of post-cold war Europe. (How many Americans realize that the Russians, in retaliation, denounced a conventional forces treaty that kept their troops away from the border?)
The reason, I think, that all this is hard to understand here in the United States, is that conservative Republican positions, which the rest of the world fears and abhors, are regarded here as mainstream. "The prize quickly loomed as a potential political liability — perhaps more burden than glory — for Mr. Obama," said today's New York Times. "Republicans contended that he had won more for his star power and oratorical skills than for his actual achievements, and even some Democrats privately questioned whether he deserved it." Yes, sadly, a large percentage of the American population--and probably a larger percentage of our punditry--still believes that unrestrained force and disregard for law are the solutions to the problems we face in the world. An entire media complex, including a whole television network and 90% of the talk radio industry, will decry the award. (No totalitarian movement ever had such a media presence before it seized power.) And thus, in the long run, both the hopes of the Nobel Committee and of the President himself depend on the development of a new American consensus--the kind of consensus that Wilson failed to develop on behalf of the League of Nations, but that Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower managed to build, first on behalf of intervention against the Japanese and Germans and then on behalf of the Cold War.
The world has voted. The rest is now up to us.
The first President to win the Nobel prize was, of course, Theodore Roosevelt, who received it in 1906 in recognition of having mediated peace between the Russians and the Japanese, after two years of very costly war. The second was Woodrow Wilson, whom I have had a chance to study more closely in recent years, and whose career reveals a lot about how the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world has changed over the last 100 years. Wilson when he assumed office held a view, very popular among Americans not only then but for the next 25 years or so, that the world's problems stemmed from the failure of nations to act according to established laws and rules. He and his Secretary of State, William Jennings Bryan, were at the forefront of a movement to conclude arbitration treaties with various powers to provide an alternative means of settling disputes. That movement, however, had not caught on among the major European powers, who were still relying on a mix of diplomacy, alliances, and larger military establishments to secure their interests. In 1914 diplomacy failed and the First World War broke out.
Two nations, for different reasons, unleashed that war. First, Austria-Hungary--faced with a long-term threat to its existence from Serbia and other new states, which included the state-sponsored Serbian terrorism that killed the heir to the throne at Sarajevo--adopted the exact same policy that the Bush Administration embraced in 2001 after 9/11. Because the Serbian state sheltered terrorists, it had to be removed by force. The Bush Administration implemented this policy both in Afghanistan, where it at least had some plausibility, and in Iraq, where it did not. In the latter case, the Bush Administration, like Vienna in 1914, submitted an ultimatum which was clearly designed to be rejected to provide a pretext for war, and disregarded the attempts of the recipient of the ultimatum to comply. Germany, meanwhile, seized upon the Austro-Hungarian-Serbian crisis as a good chance for a trial of strength with France, Russia, and if necessary Britain, and encouraged the Austrians to proceed, blocking diplomatic attempts to find a solution and unleashing a world war. Wilson was appalled, and spent two and one-half heroic years trying to find a peaceful solution to the war. In his last attempt, his great "peace without victory" speech in January 1917, he carefully avoided any judgment of the rights and wrongs of the conflict, calling for a peace based upon impartial principles. Neither side was interested. The British bitterly reproached him for what we now call "moral equivalence," and the Germans decided on unrestricted submarine warfare in an attempt to force Britain's surrender, even though they knew that it would force Wilson into the war.
It is hard to say how much freedom of action Wilson had in 1917, but I have become convinced that his decision to enter the war was a mistake. Tragically, Wilson's estimate of the situation was right: Europe desperately needed a compromise peace, in which neither side was as yet seriously interested. Such a peace might conceivably have come about had we stayed out of the war; there was no chance that it would do so after our entry, because the Allies would trust in their increasingly superior resources. After the Armistice--one which left Germany at the Allies' mercy--Wilson tried but inevitably failed to write his principles of impartiality into the Versailles Treaty. But traditional authority had already collapsed all over central and eastern Europe--most notably in Germany and in Russia--eventually allowing totalitarian movements to take over, and unleashing an even bigger war. Still, Wilson in 1919 became the second sitting President to receive the prize.
During the last 64 years, the United States and its allies have managed, remarkably, to make Wilson's dreams reality among the industrialized nations of the world. Under a succession of Democratic and Republican Administrations from Truman through Clinton, the richer nations came together, confronted Communism, and eventually saw it fall. After three generations of peace among them, their military establishments--event our own--have fallen to historically very low levels. No wars have taken place within advanced nations in all that time. While the Third World has been the scene of terrible conflicts, virtually the entire population of the advanced nations today has lived their life untouched by war.
The Nobel Committee, it seems to me, awarded its prize to President Obama because of its concern over the trends of the last nine years. Two new elements transformed the world situation in 2001, with disastrous consequences. They were, respectively, Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda on the one hand, and the conservative Republican Administration of George W. Bush on the other. What is confusing Americans today is that while the world recognizes both of them and the ideas and strategies they represented as very serious dangers, the United States does not.
Last month, at the ninth anniversary of 9/11, I saw several commentaries arguing that Bin Laden had been a failure. They were wrong. Bin Laden, along with George W. Bush, is to date the most influential figure of the new century. I have become increasingly convinced that we have never really understood what Bin Laden was trying to do, or what his real goals are. He is not really very interested, I now believe, in what happens in the United States or even in Europe. For decades he has been fighting a civil war within the Muslim world, most notably in his native Saudi Arabia, where he hates the government partly because of its association with our own. 9/11 was an attempt, I think, to provoke the United States into direct intervention in the region, because that would provide a focal point for extremist resentment and further tend to discredit our allies there. The Bush Administration's decision to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq played into his hands, all the more so because the United States lacked sufficient forces to do either job effectively. But those decisions also represented a decisive change in American foreign policy, one that threatened the whole postwar consensus in which the world had thrived.
As I have said here many times, the decision to invade Iraq, in particular, was a repudiation of all the principles of international law for which the United States had stood, at least in theory, since Wilson. The Bush Administration's National Security strategy embraced international anarchy, by claiming the right to overthrow any regime that might develop weapons which we did not think they should have. We should not have been surprised that it received almost no international support, with Britain alone among advanced industrial countries supporting it. Since 1945 the United States had been the leading supporter of international organizations; now, under Bush, they became impediments that stood in the way of what we judged we had to do. (Last night Rachel Maddow, in an excellent feature on the prize, ran a clip of John Bolton explaining that the United States government had no interest in the United Nations except to the extent that it could promote American objectives.) Bush also extended the anarchic philosophy to our ally Israel, by declaring that Israel would keep any territory that it had settled and wanted to keep in a final peace agreement. He declared, and implemented, a policy of indefinitely detaining and torturing captives and denying them any legal recourse, in violation of numerous laws and treaties which the United States had either passed or signed and ratified. And, of course, prodded by Dick Cheney, he spent about six years threatening Iran with war if it did not desist from its nuclear program.
It is, of course, perhaps the greatest difference between the United States on the one hand and Europe and Northeast Asia on the other, that they have experienced first hand the consequences of a philosophy of international anarchy, as practiced beginning in the 1930s by Japan and Germany, while we have not. The Second World War left them destroyed and destitute while raising us to new pinnacles of prosperity and power. And thus, their commitment to an orderly world has been much stronger, and remains so--partly because the aftermath of the war lasted so much longer in those countries than here, as well. The Nobel Committee, in my opinion, was reacting to signs that the United States was indeed getting back on track before it was too late.
They were not a moment too soon. The last year has shown just how difficult it will be to reverse the damage the Bush Administration did. Although we are slowly exiting in Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan has gotten much worse, and threatens to spill over into Pakistan. Iran has made considerable nuclear progress. President Obama tried, and in effect, to withdraw the critical concession Bush made to the Israeli government in order to promote peace. And the President is disinclined to treat the torture and detention policies of the Bush Administration as crimes. Yet the President has shown by both word and deed that he believes in a different world and a different foreign policy. His speeches, like Wilson's have inspired the world. And although the media have underplayed it, the Iranian agreement to allow Russia to enrich its uranium is an absolutely critical concession for the whole non-proliferation effort. It is, indeed, exactly the solution proposed by Graham Allison in his book, Nuclear Terrorism. The prize will undoubtedly give a boost to the President's broader goal of working towards the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. The decision not to station useless anti-ballistic missiles in the heart of Europe reversed another disastrous step, one which had begun to undermine the peaceful structure of post-cold war Europe. (How many Americans realize that the Russians, in retaliation, denounced a conventional forces treaty that kept their troops away from the border?)
The reason, I think, that all this is hard to understand here in the United States, is that conservative Republican positions, which the rest of the world fears and abhors, are regarded here as mainstream. "The prize quickly loomed as a potential political liability — perhaps more burden than glory — for Mr. Obama," said today's New York Times. "Republicans contended that he had won more for his star power and oratorical skills than for his actual achievements, and even some Democrats privately questioned whether he deserved it." Yes, sadly, a large percentage of the American population--and probably a larger percentage of our punditry--still believes that unrestrained force and disregard for law are the solutions to the problems we face in the world. An entire media complex, including a whole television network and 90% of the talk radio industry, will decry the award. (No totalitarian movement ever had such a media presence before it seized power.) And thus, in the long run, both the hopes of the Nobel Committee and of the President himself depend on the development of a new American consensus--the kind of consensus that Wilson failed to develop on behalf of the League of Nations, but that Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower managed to build, first on behalf of intervention against the Japanese and Germans and then on behalf of the Cold War.
The world has voted. The rest is now up to us.
Saturday, October 03, 2009
Afghanistan - An historical perspective
[Every day, hundreds of people reach this blog thanks to an email circulating under my name, comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler. It remains necessary for me to state that I did not write it and do not agree with it. I would appreciate anyone who has received it hitting "reply all" and passing that along. More information on the origins of the email is available here.]
Although I grew up amidst government decision-makers at various fairly high levels, I evidently decided at some unconscious level that their life was not for me. Like some of the characters in Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle, I prized time to think more than influence, and of that I have had plenty. Yet as you all know, I inevitably wish, from time to time, that I could bring a lifetime of study to bear at a critical moment. The trade off is real and clear: had I spent my life pursuing the positions that would give me influence, I would have much less to say. But I have seldom felt a stronger urge to make my views known than in the last two weeks, after the release of General McChrystal’s classified assessment of the situation in Afghanistan kicked off critical decisions in Washington about what to do.
General McChrystal’s assessment and his recommendations for the future lay out a detailed and very ambitious plan for the expansion of both American and NATO (ISAF) and Afghan forces in Afghanistan and for a change in strategy to take the initiative away from the Taliban and make major progress towards securing the country under the control of the Afghan government within several years. The unclassified version of the document, to begin with, does not specify exactly how many new forces will be needed or exactly where they will be stationed. The document boldly and courageously advocates changes in the approaches of US forces, including better language capabilities, a different relationship with the population, and more focus on governance, but some doubt whether current training and service schools generate enough troops who can perform these missions. The document also calls for a vastly increased civilian effort and we cannot know if the necessary resources will be available.
Historical examples—particularly China in the late 1940s, Vietnam, and Iraq—help put these recommendations in historical context and, in particular, raise certain questions involving both the resources that will be required from the United States on the one hand, and the political changes which must take place in Afghanistan, if such as a strategy as has been proposed is to work. More importantly, the Obama Administration has to answer questions about the broader purposes of our involvement and the consequences of various possible courses of action.
In historical perspective, perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Initial Assessment is its characterization of the insurgency on the one hand, and the Afghan National Government. Although observers with experience in Afghanistan are nearly unanimous in their belief that the bulk of the Afghan people do not want a return to Taliban rule, the Quetta Shura Taliban emerges from the assessment as a formidable, well-organized force—far more similar in its scope, organization and tactics, it seems to me, to the Viet Cong than to the various different opposition groups that we have faced in Iraq. Like the Viet Cong, it is setting up a parallel shadow government in much of the country, levying taxes, and using effective information warfare. The Afghan government, on the other hand, is described as commanding little authority and even less confidence. “The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and [US and NATO forces'] own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government. These problems have alienated large segments of the Afghan population. They do not trust [the Afghan government] to provide their essential needs, such as security, justice, and basic services. This crisis of confidence, coupled with a distinct lack of economic and educational opportunity, has created fertile ground for the insurgency.”
The controversy over the recent election seems to represent a further step backward for the government. The blunt assessment is commendable, but inevitably raises questions as to whether the proposed strategy can succeed. In previous cases in which the United States has successfully assisted a local government in a counterinsurgency, such as South Korea during the Korean War, El Salvador in the 1980s, or the Philippines in the 1950s, the host governments, while far from perfect by American standards, have been far more effective than the Afghan government seems to be now. The description above inspires even less confidence than contemporary evaluations of the Chinese Nationalist government in the late 1940s or the various governments of South Vietnam, which were not successful. A new long-term American commitment requires either some confidence that the Afghan government can indeed make such revolutionary changes, or alternatively, a strategy that relies on traditional local elites rather than on a central government that as yet exists only on paper.
Recognizing current political problems, the assessment calls for a new, broad, deep commitment of American and other NATO forces to live and work among the Afghan people and help establish new, effective governmental structures linked to the national government in contested areas of the country. The numbers of people involved, which the assessment does not mention, must be carefully analyzed to provide a sense of the magnitude of the task. Afghanistan has about 31 million people, of which more than 40% are Pashtuns and thus the principle targets (at least for the time being) of the Taliban. Iraq’s population is estimated to be about the same as Afghanistan’s, but the Sunni population, which posed the bulk of the security problems, is only about 33% of the country. More importantly, the population of Afghanistan is far less dense, far less urban, and far more dispersed, suggesting that the provision and supply of adequate US forces for these new tasks will pose a substantially greater problem than the attempt to secure Iraq in 2007-9. After 8 years of war and repeated deployments in both Afghanistan and Iraq, our senior leadership must ask whether we can deploy and maintain resources adequate to General McChrystal’s proposed strategy. The supply of these forces may also present serious problems, since Afghanistan is a landlocked nation whose land communications with the outside world have recently proven vulnerable to attacks. The maintenance of public support within the United States will also remain a serious and critical problem.
Why are we fighting in Afghanistan? General McChrystal’s assessment reflects the Bush Administration’s original goals for Afghanistan in 2001 and its original approach to the war on terror. Those goals demanded the establishment of cooperative regimes in countries where terrorists had previously found safe havens. Since a friendly, unified, effective government of Afghanistan remains our objective, General McChrystal did his duty in making his best determination of how that might be achieved. Yet after eight years, it seems absolutely essential for the highest authorities, both civilian and military, to ask whether that sweeping objective is the best strategy for securing the United States and its allies against terrorist attacks. One can very easily argue—as a scholar at the Army War College in Carlisle did some six years ago--that it is either impossibly utopian or far too expensive in the long run to be practical. Two weeks, suspects in a plot to make terrorist attacks within the US have been arrested. According to press reports at least one of them was trained overseas—but in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Effective domestic intelligence and law enforcement, however, have evidently been sufficient to stop this plot here at home. The situation in Pakistan is of course also of tremendous concern to the government of the United States, but it is far from clear that our involvement in Afghanistan to date has improved it from our point of view. And indeed, as is now generally recognized, we face the continuing problem in Afghanistan that very important elements within the Pakistani government do not share our objectives there, but regard the Afghan Taliban as an important ally. More limited objectives in Afghanistan deserve attention. Taliban strength seems mostly confined to Pashtun areas, leaving the possibility of maintaining a foothold in the country, and a capability to strike against terrorist camps, without making an enormous and doubtful effort to establish the authority of the central government over the whole country.
More than 60 years ago, the Truman Administration and Congress debated the question of further US assistance to the Chinese Nationalist government, then locked in a civil war with the Chinese Communists. China at that moment was surely as important strategically to the United States as Afghanistan is today, and its eventual loss to Communist could, and most certainly did, have significant negative consequences for American foreign policy for a long time to come. Secretary of State (and former Chief of Staff) George C. Marshall—one of the very greatest strategic thinkers the United States has ever produced—knew the situation first hand when he testified in executive session before a Senate Committee in early 1948. He was entirely preoccupied with trying to secure important areas of the free world against Communism. Yet in analyzing the situation in China he spoke wisely and courageously. He began by listing the very significant aid which the United States had given the Chinese government already, and continued:
“All the foregoing means, at least to me, that a great deal must be done by the Chinese authorities themselves—and that nobody else can do it for them—if that Government is to maintain itself against the Communist forces and agrarian policies. It also means that our Government must be exceedingly careful that it does not become committed to a policy involving the absorption of its resources to an unpredictable extent once the obligations are assumed of a direct responsibility for the conduct of civil war in China or for the Chinese economy, or both. . . .
“There is a tendency to feel that wherever the Communist influence is brought to bear, we should immediately meet it, head on as it were. I think this would be a most unwise procedure for the reason that we would be, in effect, handing over the initiative to the Communists. They could, therefore, spread our influence out so think that it could be of no particular effectiveness at any one point.
“We must be prepared to face the possibility that the present Chinese government may not be successful in maintaining itself against the Communist forces or other opposition that may arise in China.”
General Marshall did not believe, in short, that dubious chances of success justified transferring the very substantial resources necessary to help the Nationalist government from other tasks, such as the establishment of the NATO alliance and the rebuilding of the European economy. And indeed it is very possible that a full-scale intervention in China—advocated at the time by powerful voices in Congress and the press—would have done incalculable harm to American foreign policy as a whole in that critical period. Both the United States and, ultimately, the Chinese people, weathered the very serious short- and medium-term consequences of the fall of China to Communism.
General McChrystal has done exactly what he was asked to do: he has provided a frank assessment of the situation in Afghanistan and of what he believes is necessary to achieve the broad objective which he has been given. But before proceeding, higher authorities must do at least three things. First, they must seek out independent assessments of the chances that this new strategy would be successful. Second, they must accurately estimate its material, human and political costs, and ask whether those costs are justified by the value of the object in comparison to other needs both foreign and domestic. And thirdly, in my view, those two exercises must inevitably lead to some re-evaluation of our goals in Afghanistan in general and our strategy in the war on terror in particular, in light of both our successes and failures during the last eight years.
Although I grew up amidst government decision-makers at various fairly high levels, I evidently decided at some unconscious level that their life was not for me. Like some of the characters in Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle, I prized time to think more than influence, and of that I have had plenty. Yet as you all know, I inevitably wish, from time to time, that I could bring a lifetime of study to bear at a critical moment. The trade off is real and clear: had I spent my life pursuing the positions that would give me influence, I would have much less to say. But I have seldom felt a stronger urge to make my views known than in the last two weeks, after the release of General McChrystal’s classified assessment of the situation in Afghanistan kicked off critical decisions in Washington about what to do.
General McChrystal’s assessment and his recommendations for the future lay out a detailed and very ambitious plan for the expansion of both American and NATO (ISAF) and Afghan forces in Afghanistan and for a change in strategy to take the initiative away from the Taliban and make major progress towards securing the country under the control of the Afghan government within several years. The unclassified version of the document, to begin with, does not specify exactly how many new forces will be needed or exactly where they will be stationed. The document boldly and courageously advocates changes in the approaches of US forces, including better language capabilities, a different relationship with the population, and more focus on governance, but some doubt whether current training and service schools generate enough troops who can perform these missions. The document also calls for a vastly increased civilian effort and we cannot know if the necessary resources will be available.
Historical examples—particularly China in the late 1940s, Vietnam, and Iraq—help put these recommendations in historical context and, in particular, raise certain questions involving both the resources that will be required from the United States on the one hand, and the political changes which must take place in Afghanistan, if such as a strategy as has been proposed is to work. More importantly, the Obama Administration has to answer questions about the broader purposes of our involvement and the consequences of various possible courses of action.
In historical perspective, perhaps the most troubling aspect of the Initial Assessment is its characterization of the insurgency on the one hand, and the Afghan National Government. Although observers with experience in Afghanistan are nearly unanimous in their belief that the bulk of the Afghan people do not want a return to Taliban rule, the Quetta Shura Taliban emerges from the assessment as a formidable, well-organized force—far more similar in its scope, organization and tactics, it seems to me, to the Viet Cong than to the various different opposition groups that we have faced in Iraq. Like the Viet Cong, it is setting up a parallel shadow government in much of the country, levying taxes, and using effective information warfare. The Afghan government, on the other hand, is described as commanding little authority and even less confidence. “The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and [US and NATO forces'] own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government. These problems have alienated large segments of the Afghan population. They do not trust [the Afghan government] to provide their essential needs, such as security, justice, and basic services. This crisis of confidence, coupled with a distinct lack of economic and educational opportunity, has created fertile ground for the insurgency.”
The controversy over the recent election seems to represent a further step backward for the government. The blunt assessment is commendable, but inevitably raises questions as to whether the proposed strategy can succeed. In previous cases in which the United States has successfully assisted a local government in a counterinsurgency, such as South Korea during the Korean War, El Salvador in the 1980s, or the Philippines in the 1950s, the host governments, while far from perfect by American standards, have been far more effective than the Afghan government seems to be now. The description above inspires even less confidence than contemporary evaluations of the Chinese Nationalist government in the late 1940s or the various governments of South Vietnam, which were not successful. A new long-term American commitment requires either some confidence that the Afghan government can indeed make such revolutionary changes, or alternatively, a strategy that relies on traditional local elites rather than on a central government that as yet exists only on paper.
Recognizing current political problems, the assessment calls for a new, broad, deep commitment of American and other NATO forces to live and work among the Afghan people and help establish new, effective governmental structures linked to the national government in contested areas of the country. The numbers of people involved, which the assessment does not mention, must be carefully analyzed to provide a sense of the magnitude of the task. Afghanistan has about 31 million people, of which more than 40% are Pashtuns and thus the principle targets (at least for the time being) of the Taliban. Iraq’s population is estimated to be about the same as Afghanistan’s, but the Sunni population, which posed the bulk of the security problems, is only about 33% of the country. More importantly, the population of Afghanistan is far less dense, far less urban, and far more dispersed, suggesting that the provision and supply of adequate US forces for these new tasks will pose a substantially greater problem than the attempt to secure Iraq in 2007-9. After 8 years of war and repeated deployments in both Afghanistan and Iraq, our senior leadership must ask whether we can deploy and maintain resources adequate to General McChrystal’s proposed strategy. The supply of these forces may also present serious problems, since Afghanistan is a landlocked nation whose land communications with the outside world have recently proven vulnerable to attacks. The maintenance of public support within the United States will also remain a serious and critical problem.
Why are we fighting in Afghanistan? General McChrystal’s assessment reflects the Bush Administration’s original goals for Afghanistan in 2001 and its original approach to the war on terror. Those goals demanded the establishment of cooperative regimes in countries where terrorists had previously found safe havens. Since a friendly, unified, effective government of Afghanistan remains our objective, General McChrystal did his duty in making his best determination of how that might be achieved. Yet after eight years, it seems absolutely essential for the highest authorities, both civilian and military, to ask whether that sweeping objective is the best strategy for securing the United States and its allies against terrorist attacks. One can very easily argue—as a scholar at the Army War College in Carlisle did some six years ago--that it is either impossibly utopian or far too expensive in the long run to be practical. Two weeks, suspects in a plot to make terrorist attacks within the US have been arrested. According to press reports at least one of them was trained overseas—but in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Effective domestic intelligence and law enforcement, however, have evidently been sufficient to stop this plot here at home. The situation in Pakistan is of course also of tremendous concern to the government of the United States, but it is far from clear that our involvement in Afghanistan to date has improved it from our point of view. And indeed, as is now generally recognized, we face the continuing problem in Afghanistan that very important elements within the Pakistani government do not share our objectives there, but regard the Afghan Taliban as an important ally. More limited objectives in Afghanistan deserve attention. Taliban strength seems mostly confined to Pashtun areas, leaving the possibility of maintaining a foothold in the country, and a capability to strike against terrorist camps, without making an enormous and doubtful effort to establish the authority of the central government over the whole country.
More than 60 years ago, the Truman Administration and Congress debated the question of further US assistance to the Chinese Nationalist government, then locked in a civil war with the Chinese Communists. China at that moment was surely as important strategically to the United States as Afghanistan is today, and its eventual loss to Communist could, and most certainly did, have significant negative consequences for American foreign policy for a long time to come. Secretary of State (and former Chief of Staff) George C. Marshall—one of the very greatest strategic thinkers the United States has ever produced—knew the situation first hand when he testified in executive session before a Senate Committee in early 1948. He was entirely preoccupied with trying to secure important areas of the free world against Communism. Yet in analyzing the situation in China he spoke wisely and courageously. He began by listing the very significant aid which the United States had given the Chinese government already, and continued:
“All the foregoing means, at least to me, that a great deal must be done by the Chinese authorities themselves—and that nobody else can do it for them—if that Government is to maintain itself against the Communist forces and agrarian policies. It also means that our Government must be exceedingly careful that it does not become committed to a policy involving the absorption of its resources to an unpredictable extent once the obligations are assumed of a direct responsibility for the conduct of civil war in China or for the Chinese economy, or both. . . .
“There is a tendency to feel that wherever the Communist influence is brought to bear, we should immediately meet it, head on as it were. I think this would be a most unwise procedure for the reason that we would be, in effect, handing over the initiative to the Communists. They could, therefore, spread our influence out so think that it could be of no particular effectiveness at any one point.
“We must be prepared to face the possibility that the present Chinese government may not be successful in maintaining itself against the Communist forces or other opposition that may arise in China.”
General Marshall did not believe, in short, that dubious chances of success justified transferring the very substantial resources necessary to help the Nationalist government from other tasks, such as the establishment of the NATO alliance and the rebuilding of the European economy. And indeed it is very possible that a full-scale intervention in China—advocated at the time by powerful voices in Congress and the press—would have done incalculable harm to American foreign policy as a whole in that critical period. Both the United States and, ultimately, the Chinese people, weathered the very serious short- and medium-term consequences of the fall of China to Communism.
General McChrystal has done exactly what he was asked to do: he has provided a frank assessment of the situation in Afghanistan and of what he believes is necessary to achieve the broad objective which he has been given. But before proceeding, higher authorities must do at least three things. First, they must seek out independent assessments of the chances that this new strategy would be successful. Second, they must accurately estimate its material, human and political costs, and ask whether those costs are justified by the value of the object in comparison to other needs both foreign and domestic. And thirdly, in my view, those two exercises must inevitably lead to some re-evaluation of our goals in Afghanistan in general and our strategy in the war on terror in particular, in light of both our successes and failures during the last eight years.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Working in Washington
If you have been brought here by an email attributed to myself comparing President Obama to Adolf Hitler, you need to know that it is a fraud. I did not write the email. For more information on it go here.It looks this morning as if Gary Trudeau got the email, too.
If Barack Obama is going to secure the passage of a sweeping progressive agenda, including serious health care reform, a cap and trade program, some huge new infrastructure projects, and (very possibly) big new job creation programs if unemployment, as seems likely, remains very high, then the political culture of Washington will have to undergo some significant changes. The media can help provoke such changes by bringing current practices to light. I don't spend much time listening to cable news (although I do try to catch a little talk radio every day, just to hear what's happening in the Republicanosphere), but I fortunately discovered this clip, in which Rachel Maddow discusses the financial status of Congressman Joe Ross or Arkansas at some length, the other day. Maddow is emerging as the Drew Pearson of our time, although her sources are not nearly as good as yet, and the story explained why Ross, a prominent Blue Dog Democrat, is so opposed to the public health care option. Ross owned a pharmacy in his home town, and two years ago, he sold the building and the right to operate the pharmacy to USA Drug, a drugstore chain, for a price of almost half a million, and half a million more made up of various rights fees and a consulting contract that his wife signed with them as well. This is, I have no doubt, not a unique situation, and we must hope that in today's anarchic media, popular outlets will become more and more adept at bringing such arrangements to light. (For more on the source of Representative Ross's views, look here--a very interesting site on southern politics.)
Thirty years ago I heard Barney Frank, who was just beginning his political career as a Massachusetts state legislator, talk about the problem of campaign money in politics. The salary of the Governor of Massachusetts, he noted, was about $50,000 (actually might have been even less), while a gubernatorial campaign cost about half a million. "Why don't we pay for the campaign and let corporations pay his salary?" he asked. "We'd have a bigger piece of him!" Things, of course, have gotten much worse since then--campaigns have gotten more expensive and it looks very likely that the Supreme Court is about to strike down the most recent bipartisan attempt to curtail special interest spending. Today, however, I'd like to discuss a different kind of problem in our politics today--one involving the career paths of politicians.
Let's imagine that you are a man, or woman, who became interested in public policy early in life. Whatever your particular views, you enjoy the nuts and bolts of the American system, and your ego is healthy enough (or should I say unhealthy enough?) to want to feel that you are having an important impact. Coming to Washington at a young age, you are seduced by the beauty of its historic buildings and its political buzz--although if you have arrived in the last forty years you have also been intimidated by the enormous cost of living there without a very long commute. Eventually you discover that there are two ways in which you become a mover and shaker.
In option one, you will spend your days being led around by your handlers, rather like a prize bull, listening to the widest possible variety of outraged or ardent Americans pushing their particular cause. While you will enjoy some of these encounters far more than others, you will have to be unvaryingly polite. You will fly to and from some other part of the country on almost every weekend, where your days will be similar to those spent in Washington during the week, except that you will spend more time traveling. Your finances will be known in every detail to the public. You will spend a great deal of time raising money. You will depend almost entirely on subordinates to provide you with actual knowledge about legislation in which you are interested. If you are a Republican, you will learn that any deviation from the party line--increasingly enforced by ignorant demagogues broadcasting for hours every day--is likely to be punished by the loss of your job. It is no wonder, obviously, that such a life might make a roll in the hay with a more or less anonymous member of the opposite sex appealing, but should such become known, your career will be at an end.
Now let's look at option 2. In this case you will live in Washington full time, going out of town only for working vacations in expensive resorts. Your salary will be private, and at least ten times as much as in option 1. Rather than having to raise money, you will help dispense it. You'll live in a prime Washington location. You will have all the time you need not only to study the details of legislation in which you are interested, but also to help draft it. You won't have to see anyone that you don't want to see, and the public will probably have no idea that you exist. But you will see your work reflected in dozens of pieces of legislation of tremendous import to millions of Americans. You will probably have to give up any ideas that you cherished in your youth about the public good--but at least, in comparison to option one, you won't have to pretend that you haven't given them up.
The job of option one, in today's America, is that of an elected Senator or Representative. The job of option 2 is that of a lobbyist. And can anyone be surprised that option 1 has become a stepping stone to option 2, rather than the reverse? Thus, two former leaders of the Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives--Dick Gephardt and Dick Armey--are now busily plying their trade as lobbyists. Gephardt, who actually ran for President on a platform of universal health care coverage, now opposes it. Tom Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader who would have become Health and Human Services Secretary but for some financial indiscretions, is also working very hard for the health care industry. Bob Dole has had a remunerative post-Senatorial career. In this respect as in so many others, Ted Kennedy looks like the last of a dying breed, the legislator who (like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Sam Rayburn, Richard Russell, Emmanuel Cellar, and so many others from the past) simply can't imagine being anything else. And it is obviously no coincidence that his idealism was backed by inherited wealth, and that he faced only one serious challenge in 46 years in the Senate.
In her report on Representative Ross, Maddow noted that liberal Democrats are organizing a primary campaign against him. Democrats showed in 2008 that they could out-organized the Republicans nationwide and win the Presidency fairly handily by appealing to the interests of less well-off Americans. Delivering for those Americans, however, is turning out to be much, much harder. It will require the same kind of organization on a sustained basis. It will require the courage to turn down "compromise" legislation which will not, in fact, improve the lives of ordinary Americans at all, like the Baucus health care bill. And it will require time, which the President's rhetorical skills will have to buy. I refuse to believe that any of this is impossible, but it will be extremely difficult.
The modern United States is largely the creation of two bursts of legislative activity--the first beginning in 1933 and ending around 1945 with the GI Bill, and the second in 1964-5. The first was possible because of the catastrophic situation into which we had fallen--far worse, we must keep in mind, than what we face right now--and the second owed a great deal to an outpouring of grief over the death of John F. Kennedy, an opportunity which Lyndon Johnson seized to pass Medicare, two civil rights bills, and much more. The present moment can't be compared to either of those. Any victories over the next year will be dearly won, through hard-fought battles. If in fact the Democrats can actually gain seats at the next election--and perhaps even replace a few Blue Dogs like Congressman Ross with genuine progressives--the log jam could begin to break during the next two years. That is an optimistic scenario, but not, I think, an impossible one.
If Barack Obama is going to secure the passage of a sweeping progressive agenda, including serious health care reform, a cap and trade program, some huge new infrastructure projects, and (very possibly) big new job creation programs if unemployment, as seems likely, remains very high, then the political culture of Washington will have to undergo some significant changes. The media can help provoke such changes by bringing current practices to light. I don't spend much time listening to cable news (although I do try to catch a little talk radio every day, just to hear what's happening in the Republicanosphere), but I fortunately discovered this clip, in which Rachel Maddow discusses the financial status of Congressman Joe Ross or Arkansas at some length, the other day. Maddow is emerging as the Drew Pearson of our time, although her sources are not nearly as good as yet, and the story explained why Ross, a prominent Blue Dog Democrat, is so opposed to the public health care option. Ross owned a pharmacy in his home town, and two years ago, he sold the building and the right to operate the pharmacy to USA Drug, a drugstore chain, for a price of almost half a million, and half a million more made up of various rights fees and a consulting contract that his wife signed with them as well. This is, I have no doubt, not a unique situation, and we must hope that in today's anarchic media, popular outlets will become more and more adept at bringing such arrangements to light. (For more on the source of Representative Ross's views, look here--a very interesting site on southern politics.)
Thirty years ago I heard Barney Frank, who was just beginning his political career as a Massachusetts state legislator, talk about the problem of campaign money in politics. The salary of the Governor of Massachusetts, he noted, was about $50,000 (actually might have been even less), while a gubernatorial campaign cost about half a million. "Why don't we pay for the campaign and let corporations pay his salary?" he asked. "We'd have a bigger piece of him!" Things, of course, have gotten much worse since then--campaigns have gotten more expensive and it looks very likely that the Supreme Court is about to strike down the most recent bipartisan attempt to curtail special interest spending. Today, however, I'd like to discuss a different kind of problem in our politics today--one involving the career paths of politicians.
Let's imagine that you are a man, or woman, who became interested in public policy early in life. Whatever your particular views, you enjoy the nuts and bolts of the American system, and your ego is healthy enough (or should I say unhealthy enough?) to want to feel that you are having an important impact. Coming to Washington at a young age, you are seduced by the beauty of its historic buildings and its political buzz--although if you have arrived in the last forty years you have also been intimidated by the enormous cost of living there without a very long commute. Eventually you discover that there are two ways in which you become a mover and shaker.
In option one, you will spend your days being led around by your handlers, rather like a prize bull, listening to the widest possible variety of outraged or ardent Americans pushing their particular cause. While you will enjoy some of these encounters far more than others, you will have to be unvaryingly polite. You will fly to and from some other part of the country on almost every weekend, where your days will be similar to those spent in Washington during the week, except that you will spend more time traveling. Your finances will be known in every detail to the public. You will spend a great deal of time raising money. You will depend almost entirely on subordinates to provide you with actual knowledge about legislation in which you are interested. If you are a Republican, you will learn that any deviation from the party line--increasingly enforced by ignorant demagogues broadcasting for hours every day--is likely to be punished by the loss of your job. It is no wonder, obviously, that such a life might make a roll in the hay with a more or less anonymous member of the opposite sex appealing, but should such become known, your career will be at an end.
Now let's look at option 2. In this case you will live in Washington full time, going out of town only for working vacations in expensive resorts. Your salary will be private, and at least ten times as much as in option 1. Rather than having to raise money, you will help dispense it. You'll live in a prime Washington location. You will have all the time you need not only to study the details of legislation in which you are interested, but also to help draft it. You won't have to see anyone that you don't want to see, and the public will probably have no idea that you exist. But you will see your work reflected in dozens of pieces of legislation of tremendous import to millions of Americans. You will probably have to give up any ideas that you cherished in your youth about the public good--but at least, in comparison to option one, you won't have to pretend that you haven't given them up.
The job of option one, in today's America, is that of an elected Senator or Representative. The job of option 2 is that of a lobbyist. And can anyone be surprised that option 1 has become a stepping stone to option 2, rather than the reverse? Thus, two former leaders of the Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives--Dick Gephardt and Dick Armey--are now busily plying their trade as lobbyists. Gephardt, who actually ran for President on a platform of universal health care coverage, now opposes it. Tom Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader who would have become Health and Human Services Secretary but for some financial indiscretions, is also working very hard for the health care industry. Bob Dole has had a remunerative post-Senatorial career. In this respect as in so many others, Ted Kennedy looks like the last of a dying breed, the legislator who (like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Sam Rayburn, Richard Russell, Emmanuel Cellar, and so many others from the past) simply can't imagine being anything else. And it is obviously no coincidence that his idealism was backed by inherited wealth, and that he faced only one serious challenge in 46 years in the Senate.
In her report on Representative Ross, Maddow noted that liberal Democrats are organizing a primary campaign against him. Democrats showed in 2008 that they could out-organized the Republicans nationwide and win the Presidency fairly handily by appealing to the interests of less well-off Americans. Delivering for those Americans, however, is turning out to be much, much harder. It will require the same kind of organization on a sustained basis. It will require the courage to turn down "compromise" legislation which will not, in fact, improve the lives of ordinary Americans at all, like the Baucus health care bill. And it will require time, which the President's rhetorical skills will have to buy. I refuse to believe that any of this is impossible, but it will be extremely difficult.
The modern United States is largely the creation of two bursts of legislative activity--the first beginning in 1933 and ending around 1945 with the GI Bill, and the second in 1964-5. The first was possible because of the catastrophic situation into which we had fallen--far worse, we must keep in mind, than what we face right now--and the second owed a great deal to an outpouring of grief over the death of John F. Kennedy, an opportunity which Lyndon Johnson seized to pass Medicare, two civil rights bills, and much more. The present moment can't be compared to either of those. Any victories over the next year will be dearly won, through hard-fought battles. If in fact the Democrats can actually gain seats at the next election--and perhaps even replace a few Blue Dogs like Congressman Ross with genuine progressives--the log jam could begin to break during the next two years. That is an optimistic scenario, but not, I think, an impossible one.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Two possibilities
Over the on the web site fourthturning.com, a number of very smart and engaged people, ages ranging from teens to seventies, have been debating the present and future of American history for more than a decade. Essentially they have been trying to integrate current events into Strauss and Howe's theories--frequently through the prism of their own views. Those of us who had read those books in the 1990s when they first came out have not been surprised by the nation's descent into Crisis. Some of the longest threads on those forums have attempted to locate the beginning of the Crisis. It is becoming clear that we will only be able to answer the question of when it really began retrospectively, in twenty years or so. If we are then living in Barack Obama's vision of America we shall date the beginning from this year--but if we are living in George W. Bush's America--and I am increasingly convinced that that is quite possible--then we shall go back to dating it from 9/11, or possibly from the events of the fall of 2000 and the second theft of a presidential election in American history. The two Bush Administrations consolidated, and accelerated, critical trends in American government that had begun under Reagan (and which the Clinton years had done either little or nothing to reverse). President Obama, I am convinced, wants to reverse those trends--but his attempts to do so are showing what an enormous task that is going to be, and certainly raise real doubts as to whether he can be successful.
To explain my fears, I shall look at three critical issues in American life: health care reform (of course); corporate power and the workings of our new financial system; and whether our foreign policy will be based upon military supremacy or on the respect for, and promotion of, international law and diplomatic solutions to problems. We shall see that it is far from clear if the President has enough raw material to work with to make the changes he seems to want, and to make them stick, because so many Republican positions have become consensus positions over the last thirty years.
The health care reform effort, about which I have written a great deal, is going forward, but with less than no assurance that any meaningful change will occur. The emergence of Senator Max Baucus and his Finance Committee as the key locus of power is an interesting phenomenon--his was only one of several committees to produce a bill, and the others have produced far more important ones, including a public option. His own bill not only rejects that, but will allow insurance companies to charge premiums according to the age of their customers, and thus continue their practice of offering generous insurance to people who don't need it. Baucus has been a huge recipient of health care industry contributions for years, and they have gotten what they wanted. I am intrigued, though, that he became the focus of attention because he put together the Gang of Six and has gone through the motions of trying to put together a bill that would garner Republican support. That was hopeless, for reasons that his Senatorial colleague Jim DeMint let out of the bag months ago. As in 1993-4, the Republicans are determined to kill any bill to bring down a Democratic President--and their most powerful lobbies stand ready to fund an expensive primary campaign against any Senator who dares cast a pro-Obama vote, such as Olympia Snowe of Maine. (My own former Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee had to deal with such a challenge three years ago.) Baucus's ostensible purpose has failed, but he has meanwhile crafted the bill the health care industry wants. Meanwhile, the Republican media barrage has successfully painted the public option as equivalent to a single-payer government takeover of health care, and the media is painting the single-payer advocates in the House, who want to use Medicare to provide a much cheaper alternative to private insurance, as a fringe group. With President Obama determined above all to pass a bill, the chances are quite high, as Paul Krugman effectively acknowledged yesterday, that it won't be one that makes any real changes.
Regarding Wall Street, this week's news is rather interesting. The rest of the G-12--the world's other industrialized countries--have made up their minds about American capitalism's latest gift to the world, megabanks who pay their employees bonuses based upon short-term gains. That practice puts a premium on arranging deals for their own sake (which in turn involves the creation of new financial instruments of dubious economic value), on leveraging investments to increase profits, and on artificially bidding up the values of commodities and securities, leading, inevitably, to disastrous crashes, of which we have had two in the last decade. Their obvious solution is to put tight restrictions on such bonuses--but the Administration, according to today's New York Times, along with the British government, opposes actual caps on pay. Caps would be difficult to administer. The alternative that saw us through the Second World War and the high-growth twenty years that followed it--90% marginal tax rates that would remove any incentive to pay those bonuses--is, of course, never even mentioned, thanks to thirty years of Republican anti-tax propaganda. The Administration's economic team, in any case, is deeply implicated in the current system, which Larry Summers also defended for the managers of the Harvard Endowment, whose tens of millions (yes) of bonuses during the first half of this decade did not prevent them from losing 1/3 of the endowment's value and leaving the University lacking the case it needed to pay its bills during the last year. Like the Clinton Administration, which continued the trend towards deregulation that has left us in this mess, the Obama Administration does not seem committed to a fundamental reform or a return to the more disciplined world of our parents and grandparents.
Lastly there is foreign policy, where the President has shown the most striking break with the past, accelerating the withdrawal from Iraq slightly, demanding that Israel halt settlement construction, and now, scrapping the plan for ICBM defense sites in the Czech Republic and Poland. Taking those in reverse order, the latter is a step backward from the Bush foreign/defense policy of trying to assure American military supremacy and invulnerability, partly by undertaking preventive war to keep nations from acquiring weapons we do not think they should have. It was also a very welcome recognition of the essential fact about missile defense which Republicans have been trying to conceal for the past 25 years--that it does not work. (All this was brilliantly handled about ten years ago by Frances Fitzgerald in her book, Way out There in the Blue.) The Bush Administration's denunciation of the ABM treaty--a Republican legacy--was a terrible step backward for the US and the whole word. Sadly, it will be many years, I am sure, before anything similar is attempted again. And indeed, the Administration found it necessary to announce that it was going to work on a different missile defense system instead--although there is enough lead time to back down on that decision should they or their successors find another way out. However, the President has also branded himself an appeaser among Republicans--and his pressure on Israel will play into that as well. Here too Bush and Cheney did their work well. As I have pointed out here many times, President Bush essentially informed the world early in his first term that Israel could keep any land that it had settled in a peace treaty, and the Israelis and their American allies are now arguing that this binds future Administrations as well. It doesn't, but peace has gotten a lot less likely since then, and I'm not confident the President's well-intentioned step will have a good result.
The story of how a new generation of Republicans (very different from the Nixons, Rockefellers and even Goldwaters) managed to reverse the trend of American politics on economic, social and international issues from the 1980s until 2009 is an extraordinary one that should eventually produce some great history. In so doing they created, and relied upon, an active intellectual elite, a strong and growing presence in the media, and an emotional mass movement that now uses the techniques developed by the civil rights movement in the 1960s. For various reasons--which I shall try to take up at another time--the Democrats cannot at the moment deploy comparable forces. Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 benefited from another historical accident--he came into office after three-plus years of catastrophic depression which had given him much more freedom of action, and much bigger majorities, than President Obama has. How the next four years, and the next twenty years, will turn out, remains a very open question.
To explain my fears, I shall look at three critical issues in American life: health care reform (of course); corporate power and the workings of our new financial system; and whether our foreign policy will be based upon military supremacy or on the respect for, and promotion of, international law and diplomatic solutions to problems. We shall see that it is far from clear if the President has enough raw material to work with to make the changes he seems to want, and to make them stick, because so many Republican positions have become consensus positions over the last thirty years.
The health care reform effort, about which I have written a great deal, is going forward, but with less than no assurance that any meaningful change will occur. The emergence of Senator Max Baucus and his Finance Committee as the key locus of power is an interesting phenomenon--his was only one of several committees to produce a bill, and the others have produced far more important ones, including a public option. His own bill not only rejects that, but will allow insurance companies to charge premiums according to the age of their customers, and thus continue their practice of offering generous insurance to people who don't need it. Baucus has been a huge recipient of health care industry contributions for years, and they have gotten what they wanted. I am intrigued, though, that he became the focus of attention because he put together the Gang of Six and has gone through the motions of trying to put together a bill that would garner Republican support. That was hopeless, for reasons that his Senatorial colleague Jim DeMint let out of the bag months ago. As in 1993-4, the Republicans are determined to kill any bill to bring down a Democratic President--and their most powerful lobbies stand ready to fund an expensive primary campaign against any Senator who dares cast a pro-Obama vote, such as Olympia Snowe of Maine. (My own former Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee had to deal with such a challenge three years ago.) Baucus's ostensible purpose has failed, but he has meanwhile crafted the bill the health care industry wants. Meanwhile, the Republican media barrage has successfully painted the public option as equivalent to a single-payer government takeover of health care, and the media is painting the single-payer advocates in the House, who want to use Medicare to provide a much cheaper alternative to private insurance, as a fringe group. With President Obama determined above all to pass a bill, the chances are quite high, as Paul Krugman effectively acknowledged yesterday, that it won't be one that makes any real changes.
Regarding Wall Street, this week's news is rather interesting. The rest of the G-12--the world's other industrialized countries--have made up their minds about American capitalism's latest gift to the world, megabanks who pay their employees bonuses based upon short-term gains. That practice puts a premium on arranging deals for their own sake (which in turn involves the creation of new financial instruments of dubious economic value), on leveraging investments to increase profits, and on artificially bidding up the values of commodities and securities, leading, inevitably, to disastrous crashes, of which we have had two in the last decade. Their obvious solution is to put tight restrictions on such bonuses--but the Administration, according to today's New York Times, along with the British government, opposes actual caps on pay. Caps would be difficult to administer. The alternative that saw us through the Second World War and the high-growth twenty years that followed it--90% marginal tax rates that would remove any incentive to pay those bonuses--is, of course, never even mentioned, thanks to thirty years of Republican anti-tax propaganda. The Administration's economic team, in any case, is deeply implicated in the current system, which Larry Summers also defended for the managers of the Harvard Endowment, whose tens of millions (yes) of bonuses during the first half of this decade did not prevent them from losing 1/3 of the endowment's value and leaving the University lacking the case it needed to pay its bills during the last year. Like the Clinton Administration, which continued the trend towards deregulation that has left us in this mess, the Obama Administration does not seem committed to a fundamental reform or a return to the more disciplined world of our parents and grandparents.
Lastly there is foreign policy, where the President has shown the most striking break with the past, accelerating the withdrawal from Iraq slightly, demanding that Israel halt settlement construction, and now, scrapping the plan for ICBM defense sites in the Czech Republic and Poland. Taking those in reverse order, the latter is a step backward from the Bush foreign/defense policy of trying to assure American military supremacy and invulnerability, partly by undertaking preventive war to keep nations from acquiring weapons we do not think they should have. It was also a very welcome recognition of the essential fact about missile defense which Republicans have been trying to conceal for the past 25 years--that it does not work. (All this was brilliantly handled about ten years ago by Frances Fitzgerald in her book, Way out There in the Blue.) The Bush Administration's denunciation of the ABM treaty--a Republican legacy--was a terrible step backward for the US and the whole word. Sadly, it will be many years, I am sure, before anything similar is attempted again. And indeed, the Administration found it necessary to announce that it was going to work on a different missile defense system instead--although there is enough lead time to back down on that decision should they or their successors find another way out. However, the President has also branded himself an appeaser among Republicans--and his pressure on Israel will play into that as well. Here too Bush and Cheney did their work well. As I have pointed out here many times, President Bush essentially informed the world early in his first term that Israel could keep any land that it had settled in a peace treaty, and the Israelis and their American allies are now arguing that this binds future Administrations as well. It doesn't, but peace has gotten a lot less likely since then, and I'm not confident the President's well-intentioned step will have a good result.
The story of how a new generation of Republicans (very different from the Nixons, Rockefellers and even Goldwaters) managed to reverse the trend of American politics on economic, social and international issues from the 1980s until 2009 is an extraordinary one that should eventually produce some great history. In so doing they created, and relied upon, an active intellectual elite, a strong and growing presence in the media, and an emotional mass movement that now uses the techniques developed by the civil rights movement in the 1960s. For various reasons--which I shall try to take up at another time--the Democrats cannot at the moment deploy comparable forces. Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 benefited from another historical accident--he came into office after three-plus years of catastrophic depression which had given him much more freedom of action, and much bigger majorities, than President Obama has. How the next four years, and the next twenty years, will turn out, remains a very open question.
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